Is Your Google Ads Campaign Working? Compare These Ten Metrics
There is no single number in Google Ads that tells you whether a campaign is any good. But there are ten numbers that will. Compare each one to what other businesses in your industry are getting, and you will know quickly whether your account is being run well or quietly wasting money.
That is the test. Not “is this number high?” High compared to what? The question is: is this number better than the average for my industry?
If every metric below beats its benchmark, your campaign is running efficiently. If three of them fall short, you have just found your next three jobs.
Find your row first
| Industry | Click-through rate | Conversion rate |
|---|---|---|
| Home & home improvement | 6.47% | 8.05% |
| Industrial & commercial | 6.57% | 8.20% |
| Dentists & dental | 5.66% | 10.67% |
| Physicians & surgeons | 6.61% | 12.43% |
| Health & fitness | 5.81% | 6.94% |
| Finance & insurance | 9.83% | 2.64% |
| Real estate | 7.61% | 3.70% |
| Attorneys & legal | 5.87% | 5.55% |
| All industries | 6.64% | 8.18% |
These numbers come from WordStream and LocaliQ’s 2026 study. They looked at 13,474 US search campaigns across 23 industries, between April 2025 and March 2026. The full 23-industry table is at the end of this article.
Keep your own row open in another tab. Every benchmark below points back to it.
One thing to know first: the auction
Every time someone types a search into Google, Google runs an instant auction to decide which ads appear and in what order. You are not buying a fixed spot. You are entering that auction thousands of times a day, and winning some of them.
Most of the numbers below describe how you are doing in that auction. It helps to picture it that way.
Why cost per click and cost per lead are not on this list
Two of the most talked-about numbers in Google Ads are missing here. That is on purpose.
Percentages measure behaviour. Dollars measure a local market.
How often people click an ad that matches their search is a question about human behaviour. So is how often they get in touch after landing on a decent page. That behaviour is much the same across a whole country. Someone looking for an emergency plumber acts about the same in Vancouver as in Halifax.
What that person is worth is not the same at all. Household income differs by city. So does the number of competitors, the value of the homes, and the size of a typical job. All of that decides what other advertisers are willing to bid. A roofing click in a wealthy suburb and a roofing click in a rural town are two different purchases. Average them together and you get a number that fits nowhere.
Cost per lead has the same problem, because cost per lead is just your cost per click divided by your conversion rate.
There is a second problem if you are reading this from Canada. That study covers US campaigns. Comparing your dollars to it means crossing a currency and a market at the same time. Percentages hold up across that gap. Dollar figures do not.
None of this means your cost per lead does not matter. It is probably the number you think about most. It is just not a number to compare against a national average. Compare it to your own past results, and to what a customer is actually worth to you. That is a different job, and it is what the next article covers.
One dollar figure does appear below. It is there because you compare it to your own budget, not to anyone else’s numbers.
Group one: can you show up at all?
Four numbers decide whether you even make it into the auction.
1. Estimated Top of Page Bid
What it is: what Google thinks you need to bid to appear above the free search results for that keyword.
How to read it: compare it to what you are actually paying, not to any benchmark. If your cost per click is well below the estimate, you are rarely reaching the top of the page. You are getting whatever traffic is left over.
This is the one dollar figure that still works, because it is already local. Google works it out from the auction you are actually in, against the competitors you actually have. So there is nothing outside your account to compare it to. You compare it to your own budget.
Work out the most you can pay for a click on that keyword and still make money. If the estimate is higher than that, you will not hold the top of the page there today. A better Quality Score lowers the estimate, so a small gap is worth working on. A gap of three or four times is not. That means your competitors can pay more for that click than you can, and the right move is to spend the money on keywords where the numbers already work.
2. Search Lost IS (Budget)
What it is: how often your ad could have shown but did not, because your daily budget ran out. “IS” is short for impression share, which just means the share of the times you could have appeared that you actually did.
Benchmark: under 10%. Above 30% means your budget is holding you back badly.
This one is simple. You were good enough to win those auctions and could not afford to enter them. If everything else in the campaign is healthy, this is the cheapest growth you can buy. The people searching are already there, and they are already looking for what you sell.
3. Search Lost IS (Rank)
What it is: how often your ad could have shown but did not, because Google ranked it too low. This happens even when you still have budget left.
Benchmark: under 20%. Above 25% means something needs fixing.
This is a completely different problem from the one above, and the fix is the opposite. Losing on rank means you were in the auction, you had money available, and you still lost. That is either a bidding problem or a Quality Score problem.
Adding budget to fix a rank problem wastes money. Rewriting ads to fix a budget problem wastes a week. Read these two numbers separately. Mixing them up is the most common mistake in Google Ads.
4. Top Impression Share and Absolute Top Impression Share
What they are: how often you appeared above the free search results, and how often you were in the very first position.
Benchmark: there is no universal target. First position costs a lot more, and it does not reliably bring better customers.
Use these two as a direction, not a score. If your Top Impression Share is very low while your overall impression share looks fine, you are showing up often but always near the bottom. Your click-through rate will suffer for it. And if you are chasing first position for its own sake, you are probably paying extra for something that looks good in a report but does not bring in more work.
Group two: are your ads any good?
These five numbers measure the ads themselves. Do people want to click them, and does Google think they deserve to be shown? They also decide what you pay per click, which is why they come before anything about leads.
5. Click-through rate
What it is: out of everyone who saw your ad, the share who clicked it.
Benchmark: your row. Home improvement 6.47%, dental 5.66%, finance and insurance 9.83%. All industries together, 6.64%.
This is the clearest sign of whether your ads match what people are searching for. If yours is below your industry average, the ad is not speaking to the search. Usually that means the wrong message, the wrong offer, or keywords too loosely connected to the ad they trigger.
One warning. A lot of advice online still quotes a 2% to 3% average. That number is years out of date. Click-through rates have risen a long way since then, and measuring yourself against the old figure will make a weak account look fine.
6. Quality Score
What it is: Google’s rating, from 1 to 10, of how well your keyword, your ad and your landing page fit together.
Benchmark: 5 is average. 7 is good.
This is the number that turns good ads into money, because Google charges you less per click when your score is high:
| Quality Score | Roughly what you save per click, against a score of 5 |
|---|---|
| 8 out of 10 | about 33% cheaper |
| 9 out of 10 | about 44% cheaper |
| 10 out of 10 | about 50% cheaper |
A third off every click is the difference between a campaign that works and one that does not, and it costs you nothing extra. A 10 is rare, and pushing for one usually costs more time than it is worth. Get to 7 or 8 and move on to something else.
Notice that this saving is a percentage too. Whatever a click costs where you are, a better score takes the same share off it.
7, 8 and 9. Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, Landing Page Experience
Your Quality Score is built from these three parts. Google rates each one Below average, Average, or Above average. You have to add these columns in your keyword view, because Google hides them by default.
Benchmark: “Above average” on all three. Anything marked Below average is Google telling you exactly what to fix.
- Expected CTR — will people click this ad for this search? Below average usually means the ad does not match what the searcher wants.
- Ad Relevance — does the ad match the keyword? Below average often means too many loosely related keywords are sharing one ad.
- Landing Page Experience — does the page deliver what the ad promised? People ignore this one most, because fixing it is not an advertising job.
That last point is worth sitting with. Two of the three parts are about your ads. The third is about your website. If Landing Page Experience is below average, no amount of rewriting your ads will fix it. You will keep paying extra on every single click for a problem that lives on your own site.
Group three: does the click turn into an enquiry?
One number left. It is also the one most likely to be measuring something other than what you think.
First: what are you actually counting?
The benchmark counts leads. A real service request. Someone filled in a form or phoned to ask about the work.
It does not count page views, button clicks, PDF downloads, how far someone scrolled, how long they stayed, or newsletter signups. Plenty of accounts record all of those as conversions, and sometimes there is a good reason to. But if your account counts six different actions as conversions, you are not measuring the same thing the benchmark measures. Comparing the two gives you a number that means nothing.
So run two checks first.
Check one: what is marked as a conversion? In Goals, then Conversions, look at which actions are set as primary. If anything in that list is not a person asking about your work, your conversion rate is inflated, and the comparison is broken before you start.
Check two: of the ones that really are enquiries, how many are real? A lead worth counting is a real service request. Not a form fill, not a button click, not someone rescheduling, not a 30-second call.
Most counts are padded with spam, wrong numbers, people asking about a job, and existing customers ringing the same number they have always rung. Think of a dental practice. The tracked number is the same one patients have used for twenty years, so rescheduling and billing calls alone can be a third of what gets recorded.
Here is what that does to your numbers. A dental practice reporting a 10.67% conversion rate looks like it is matching its industry average exactly. If only 60% of those conversions are real service requests, the true rate is 6.4%. That is well below the benchmark, and the dashboard will never tell you.
Do this before you compare anything: pull up the last 90 days of conversions and read twenty of them. Work out what share were genuine enquiries. That percentage corrects everything else.
10. Conversion rate
What it is: out of everyone who clicked your ad, the share who then got in touch.
Benchmark: your row — and only once you have done the check above.
| Industry | Average conversion rate |
|---|---|
| Physicians & surgeons | 12.43% |
| Dentists & dental | 10.67% |
| Industrial & commercial | 8.20% |
| Home & home improvement | 8.05% |
| Health & fitness | 6.94% |
| Attorneys & legal | 5.55% |
| Real estate | 3.70% |
| Finance & insurance | 2.64% |
Look at how far apart the top and bottom are. That gap is not about who advertises better. Finance and insurance sits at 2.64% because people compare five providers before they commit. Physicians sit at 12.43% because someone searching for a doctor usually wants one today. Read your own row and ignore the top of the table.
Conversion rate is also the number on this list you control least through Google Ads. The ad brings someone to a page. What happens next is the page’s job. If your conversion rate stays low while your click-through rate and Quality Score are healthy, the problem is your website, not your campaign.
One more thing worth knowing. Conversion rates went up in 87% of industries in the 2026 figures. The bar is rising. An account that stays the same year after year is falling behind without anything looking wrong.
All 23 industries
| Industry | Click-through rate | Conversion rate |
|---|---|---|
| Animals & pets | 7.49% | 16.22% |
| Apparel, fashion & jewellery | 6.64% | 4.50% |
| Arts & entertainment | 12.75% | 5.91% |
| Attorneys & legal services | 5.87% | 5.55% |
| Automotive — for sale | 8.28% | 6.01% |
| Automotive — repair, service & parts | 5.56% | 15.51% |
| Beauty & personal care | 6.75% | 10.35% |
| Business services | 6.10% | 4.85% |
| Career & employment | 5.88% | 3.05% |
| Dentists & dental services | 5.66% | 10.67% |
| Education & instruction | 7.56% | 13.14% |
| Finance & insurance | 9.83% | 2.64% |
| Furniture | 6.57% | 2.99% |
| Health & fitness | 5.81% | 6.94% |
| Home & home improvement | 6.47% | 8.05% |
| Industrial & commercial | 6.57% | 8.20% |
| Personal services | 7.16% | 12.34% |
| Physicians & surgeons | 6.61% | 12.43% |
| Real estate | 7.61% | 3.70% |
| Restaurants & food | 6.83% | 8.05% |
| Shopping, collectibles & gifts | 8.28% | 4.01% |
| Sports & recreation | 8.75% | 7.69% |
| Travel | 9.32% | 5.83% |
| All industries | 6.64% | 8.18% |
Efficient is not the same as profitable
If your numbers beat your industry averages, your campaign is running efficiently. That is worth knowing, and it is what this article is for.
It is not the same as making money. A campaign can beat every benchmark on this page and still lose you money. None of these numbers know your profit margin. None of them know how many enquiries you turn into paying customers. None of them know what a customer is worth to you. That is the same reason the dollar figures were left off the list.
Those questions need a different set of numbers, and they deserve their own article. This one will get a follow-up.
Get efficient first. It is the part you can fix from inside the account.
Everything above can be checked in your own account in an afternoon, and most of what you find you can fix yourself. The conversion check in particular — reading twenty calls and keeping a tally — is the most useful hour most owners can spend on their advertising.
If you would rather have it run for you: Coding Bull fronts the ads and caps the cost per lead, so anything over that cap comes out of our pocket. That only works if a lead means a real service request, which is why the definition above is the one we count against.
